Theorycrafting, Computations, and General Observations from a Shadow Point of View

Usual disclaimer: the following information is as of the Mist of Pandaria Beta build 15972, released on August 14, 2012, and may not be accurate once future patches are released.

For a primer on this post, please see the original post from early last week. To see the previous set of changes, please see the update post from last week.

This update on where our talent combinations stand is going to be shorter than usual because, well, there’s not a lot to talk about: we got nerfed and no mechanics changed. More detailed post coming with the next build.

I computed (napkin math’d) this out by hand to be somewhere between a total DPS loss on the order of 6%-7%, depending on talents and fight choices. Now that sims are done, I won’t have to guess at it anymore:

Ouch.

On the bright side, my estimate on DPS reduction were too high in some cases. On the bad side, we still took an average DPS nerf of 6k.

The only good news is that it doesn’t look like Blizzard is going to do any more nerfing to us (/knock on wood) as we’re quite literally in the bottom 1/6 of DPS specs. Ghostcrawler has stated that they have multiple builds being worked on and tested internally, so I would say with high confidence that we will have a buff of some sort incoming within the next two builds…exactly what kind of buff is yet to be determined, though.

Here’s the new stat weights for BiS:

Not as much change as I was expecting. Haste is still worst and Mastery is best, thanks to the DP+2 Haste Breakpoint at 8085 Haste. below the SWP+2 and DP+2 breakpoints, however, Haste is still #1.

Honestly was not sure where to respond, but I am an avid theorycrafter for Spriest exclusively, I have posted this on several other forums, but I wanted to know if you had any incite to the problem I am having. How do you fix (assuming you do fix it) forcing SimC to not show negative values for haste on FDCL/SWI fights that are set on heavy movement ?. Even at 50K iterations and having an exception at running haste an additional multiplier of 40+ I still get negative values for haste

I’ve noticed this same behavior recently as well for FDCl and SWI on HeavyMovement or HelterSkelter. I have a graph of how Haste affects our DPS (working with Bilkenstien from TotemSpot, and using the data for a new post here) for Patchwerk and even on there you can see that SWI drops DPS around SWP breakpoints (to be expected), but it takes over 1000 Haste to get back to the previous DPS! I’d imagine something similar to this is happening with SWI and FDCL in high movement encounters.

What profile did you use? Or, at least, how much Haste does your profile have, does it have 4P T14, etc. ?

One more thing, I recently started following Bilkenstien when I accidentally found a tweet he made about a potential problem I had discovered (he found it several weeks before me but w/e) I was curious about how and why Fire mages were dominating the dps charts. So I ran a quick simulation of all the caster classes for scaling values of intellect noticing that Fire mages scaling for intellect was 4.8 give or take, (only curious enough to run on patchwerk)all caster classes/specs intellect stat weights gradually get lower as their simulated dps gets lower oddly enough hybrid casters being all bottom of the barrel with the lowest value of intellect do you think that if Blizz balanced dps around all classes having a intellect stat weight of 4.18 (for example) as well as all other classes having similar stat weights for their intended primary stat that dps would be more balanced ? Sorry if this is in the wrong section, feel free to remove it if it is, I didnt see a general discussion section.

I did it mostly on custom profile, on every SimC release since 504-1, including self edited code version I messed around with myself. (Havent gotten a chance to try it on the new 5.1 released version of SimC)Anyways the generic profiles that I loaded were as follows: T14 BIS, T14 BIS (Non Elite gear), T14 BIS (non elite, non heroic) All 3 of these profiles were also regemmed (reforged as needed) to attempt to be as close to 8285 haste break point w/o actually reaching the break point for additional testing of spriest haste/dps. It seemed no matter the release version, or gear setup, it would always show negative haste scaling values for heavy movement fights on FDCL and SWI. I got it a few times on PI fights but simply adding scale_haste_iterations= x amount in the exception tab easily fixed, it I’ve tried several other solutions both easy and complicated for FDCL and SWI to fix the issue but the problem remains. even setting the amount to 40+ for haste multiplier does not seem to work